The Barleycorn upstairs space features Martin Audio arrays, Crown amps, Allen & Heath GL2800 mixer and select pieces of outboard.
The new 20,000-square-foot, two-story John Barleycorn club in Schaumburg, Ill. (a suburb of Chicago), features high-end audio, video, stage and club lighting systems thanks to the work of local installer Sound & Lighting Designs. The venue combines a restaurant space and satellite bars on the first floor, while the second floor includes a club and live sound venue.
When it came to choosing the system, owners Sam Sanchez and Michael Gonzalez were heavily involved. As install company owner Timothy Pickett recalls, “We shopped several brands and went to a Martin Audio demo, and the sound system just blew everybody away. Once the owners heard the speakers, they told me, ‘This is what we want. Buy it.’”
The upstairs 25×12-foot stage is used for live performances by national and local bands, and DJs. Also on the second level are three main bars with seating and booths surrounding the stage with facilities to host up to 1,000 people. “We have three Martin Audio W8LM arrays, four each left and right, and three center above the stage, with the right and left stacks tilted out at 30-degree angles and the center array straight at the crowd,” Pickett says. “We chose W8LMs because they have such a wide horizontal throw and the room is a rectangle with the stage at the short end, so we needed something with real wide coverage. There are six WLX subs under the stage, side-by-side coupled together, so there’s a stack for every array.”
The rest of the system comprises Crown amplification; an Allen & Heath GL2800 mixer; Klark Teknik, dbx and BSS processing; DWR-21 and ER-35 racks from Middle Atlantic Products; and Shure and Sennheiser mics.
